Re: Using Views for security ?

Cynthia Leong ( cynthia@hpsgcip1.sgp.hp.com ) writes: > > Do you have any experience in using views for security purposes? > If yes, please let me know : Yes, I have used views, and our product DB Privileges supports granting and revoking privileges on views. > 1) How do you make use of it. The main reason to use a view and not the table for security is to control security at the row level. If you are granting users access to all rows in a table, then it is best to maintain security at the table level. A view works well when you want a user to have access to a limited set of rows in a table. (e.g only the rows they have entered, or only the customers in their region.) As an example, if you wanted to limit a sales person's access to only customers in their region you would: create view region_a as select * from customer where region = "A"; revoke all on customer from salesa; grant all on region_a to salesa; > 2) What are its limitations. All security depends on Informix being correctly installed, controlling access to the user and group informix, and having the permissons on your unix devices or files for the database set correctly. Another problem is public access. If you revoke a user's table privilege, but still allow public access, the user can access the table through public access. This defeats the purpose of having row level security with views. > 3) What are its strength > 4) Any specific reason why you opt for views? Row level security as in the example above. > 5) Maintenability The same as table level security. Regards - Lester ############################################################################# # Lester Knutsen lester@access.digex.net # # Advanced DataTools Corporation Voice: 703-256-0267 # # Providing Informix Database Tools and Consulting # #############################################################################